Amazon S3 Storage Service Goes Down, Still Not Up

Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage service went down earlier this morning, according to numerous tips we’ve received. The service has impacted many companies, including folks like Twitter. According to our tipsters, the service went down around 4:30 a.m., and is showing a 500 Internal Server Error message.

Amazon Web Services forums are full of people chatting about the outage. One poster on the forum summed up the situation nicely, saying, “The s3 service is great but this just proves you can’t rely on it, this is a major issue especially since it’s been down for so long. Way to go Amazon.”

This outage, one of the first large-scale problems to hit Amazon, shows that a lot of work needs to be done before we can completely rely on the cloud. As I have often said, we are running the 21st century web on infrastructure that was dreamed up in the 1990s, long before the web’s current scale. Still, that doesn’t take away my long-standing enthusiasm for Amazon’s web services strategy.

We will keep you posted. Meanwhile, let us know how you have been impacted and what you are doing to build the redundancy of your web service.

Nick Carr has his take on the situation. “Given that entire businesses run on S3 and related services, Amazon has a particularly heavy responsibility not only to fix the problem quickly but to explain it fully,” he writes. I agree with him, and hopefully Amazon will do the needful. Amazon says it is fixed it, but there seem to continuing problems with the service, as the forum indicatess.